Plexus

  “No, let’s get on with the roof,” I urged. “I’m just getting the hang of it.”

  As this sounded plausible and logical to him, Karen voted to tackle the roof again. Once more we clambered up the ladder, did a little preliminary footwork on the ridgepole, and settled down to hammering nails. In a short time the sweat was pouring off me like rain. The more I perspired the more the flies buzzed and bit. My back felt like a raw steak. I accelerated my rhythm perceptibly.

  “Good work, Hank!” yelled Karen. “We ought to be through in a day or two at this rate.”

  He had no more than got the words out of his mouth when a shingle flew skyward and caught him over the eye. It made a gash from which the blood trickled into his eye.

  “Oh darling, are you hurt?” cried Lotta.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Carry on, Henry.”

  “I’ll get some iodine,” yelled Lotta, trotting off into the house.

  Quite unintentionally I let the hammer fall from my hand. It fell through a hole in the sheathing right on Lotta’s skull. She gave a shriek as if a shark had bitten her, and with that Karen scrambled down from his perch.

  It was time to call a halt. Lotta had to be put to bed with a cold compress on her head. Karen had a big patch of court plaster over his left eye. He never uttered a word of complaint.

  “I guess you’ll have to make the dinner again tonight,” he said to Mona. It seemed to me that there was a secret note of pleasure in his voice. Mona and I had difficulty restraining our jubilation. We waited a while before broaching the subject of the menu.

  “Fix anything you like,” said Karen.

  “How about lamb chops?” I put in. “Some lamb chops with French peas, some noodles and maybe artichokes too—how does it sound?”

  Karen thought it would be excellent. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked Mona.

  “Not at all,” she said. “It’s a pleasure.”

  Then, as if it were quite an afterthought, she added: “Didn’t we bring some Riesling yesterday? I think a bottle of Riesling would go well with the chops.”

  “Just the thing,” said Karen.

  I took a shower and got into my pajamas. The prospect of enjoying another good meal revived me. I was ready to sit down and do a bit of dictaphone work to show my appreciation.

  “I think you’d better rest up,” said Karen. “You’ll feel a little muscle-bound tomorrow.”

  “What about those charts?” I said. “I’d really like to do something, you know. I’m sorry I was so damned awkward.”

  “Tut tut,” said Karen. “You’ve done a good day’s work. Take it easy till dinner time.”

  “All right, if you insist. O.K.”

  I opened a bottle of beer and plunked myself in the easy chair.

  Thus it went au bord de la mer. Great sand spits, with an increasing surf which pounded in one’s ears at night like the hammering of a stupendous toccata. Now and then sandstorms. The sand seeped in everywhere, even through the glass panes, it seemed.

  We were all good swimmers; we bobbed up and down in the heavy surf like otters. Karen always seeking to improve matters, made use of an inflated rubber mattress. After he had taken a siesta on the bosom of the deep, he would swim out a mile or two and give us all a good fright.

  Evenings he enjoyed playing games. He played in dead earnest always, whether it was pinochle, cribbage, checkers, casino, whist, fan-tan, dominoes, euchre or backgammon. I don’t believe there was a game with which he was not conversant. Part of his general education, don’t you know. The rounded individual. He could play hopscotch or tiddlywinks with the same furious zeal and adroitness. Once, when I went to town with him, I suggested that we drop into a pool parlor and play a game of pool. He asked me if I wanted to shoot first. Without thinking I said, “No, you go ahead.” He did. He cleaned up the table four times before I had a chance to use the cue. When it finally came my turn I suggested that we go home. “Next time you shoot first,” he said, intimating that that would be a break for me. It never occurred to him, that just because he was a shark, it would have been sporting to miss a shot occasionally. To play ping-pong with him was hopeless; only Bill Tilden could have returned his serves. The only game in which I might have stood a chance to break even was craps, but I never liked rolling dice, it was boring.

  One evening, after discussing some books on occultism, I reminded him of the time we had taken a trip up the Hudson on an excursion boat. “You remember how we pushed the ouija board around?” His face lit up. Of course he did. He would like to try it again if I were willing. He’d improvise a board.

  We sat up that night till two in the morning pushing the damned thingamajig around. We must have made a lot of connections in the astral realm, judging by the time which elapsed. As usual it was I who summoned the eccentric figures—Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, Nostradamus, Claude Saint-Martin, Ignatius Loyola, the Marquis de Sade and such like. Karen made notes of the messages we received. Said he would dictate them to the dictaphone the next day. To be filed under 1.352-Cz 240.(18), which was the exact index for material derived from the departed spirits by means of the ouija board on such and such an evening in the region of the Rockaways. It was weeks later when I decocted this particular record. I had forgotten all about the incident. Suddenly, in Karen’s serious voice I began getting these crazy messages from the blue.… “Eating well. Time hangs heavy. Coronary divertissements tomorrow. Paracelsus.” I began to shake with laughter. So the idiot really was filing this stuff away! I was curious to know what else he might have tucked away under this classification. I went to the card files first. There were at least fifty cross references indicated. Each one was battier than the previous one. I got out the folders and file boxes in which the papers were stored away. His notes and jottings were scribbled in a minute scrawl on odds and ends, often paper napkins, blotters, menus, tally cards. Sometimes it was nothing more than a phrase which a friend had dropped while conversing in the subway; sometimes it was an embryonic thought which had flitted through his head while taking a crap. Sometimes it was a page torn from a book—the title, author, publisher and place always carefully noted as well as the date when he had come across it. There were bibliographies in at least a dozen languages, including Chinese and Persian.

  One curious chart interested me enormously; I intended to pump him about it one day but never did. As best I could make out, it represented a map of some singular region in limbo, the boundaries of which had been given in a seance with a medium. It looked like a geodetic survey of a bad dream. The names of the places were written in a language which nobody could possibly understand. But Karen had given a rough translation on separate sheets of paper. “Notes,” it read: “The following translations of place names in the quaternary decan of Devachan were volunteered by de Quincey working through Madame X. Coleridge is said to have verified them before his death but the documents in which the testimony is given are temporarily lost.” The singular thing about this shadowy sector of the beyond was this: in its confines, imaginary perhaps, were gathered the shades of such diverse and interesting personalities as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Longinus, Virgil, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius of Tyana, Montezuma, Xenophon, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Nicolaus of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Asoka, St. François de Sales, Fénelon, Chuang Tzu, Nostradamus, Saladin, the Pope Joanna, St. Vincent de Paul, Paracelsus, Malatesta, Origen, together with a coterie of women saints. One would like to know what had drawn this conglomeration of souls together. One would like to know what they discussed in the mysterious language of the departed. One would like to know if the great problems which had tormented them on earth had been finally resolved. One would like to know if they consorted together in divine harmony. Warriors, saints, mystics, sages, magicians, martyrs, kings, thaumaturgists.… What an assemblage! What would one not give to be with them just for a day!

  As I say, for some mysterious reason I never brought this subject to Karen’s attention. There wa
s little, indeed, outside our work which I did discuss with him, first because of his great reserve, second because to introduce even a slight detail meant listening to an inexhaustible harangue, third because I was intimidated by the vast domain of knowledge which appeared to be his. I contented myself with browsing through his books, which embraced an enormous range of subject matter. He read Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Sanskrit with apparent ease, and was fluent in a dozen living tongues, including Russian, Turkish and Arabic. The titles of his books were alone sufficient to set my head spinning. What astounded me, however, was that so little of this vast store of learning seeped into our daily talk. Sometimes I had the feeling that he regarded me as a thorough ignoramus. Other times he embarrassed me by posing questions which only a Thomas Aquinas could cope with. Now and then he gave me the impression that he was just a child with an overdeveloped brain. He had little humor and almost no imagination. Outwardly he appeared to be a model husband, always ready to cater to his wife’s whims, always alert to serve her, always solicitous and protective, at times positively chivalric. I couldn’t help but wonder at times what it would be like to be married to this human adding machine. With Karen everything proceeded according to schedule. Intercourse too, no doubt. Perhaps he kept a secret file reminding him when intercourse was due, together with notes on the results—spiritual, moral, mental and physical.

  One day he caught me unawares reading a volume of Elie Faure which I had dug up. I had just read the paragraph which opens the chapter on The Sources of Greek Art.… “On condition that we respect ruins, that we do not rebuild them, that, after having asked their secret, we let them be recovered by the ashes of the centuries, the bones of the dead, the rising mass of waste which once was vegetations and races, the eternal drapery of the foliage—their destiny may stir our emotion. It is through them that we touch the depths of our history, just as we are bound to the roots of life by the griefs and sufferings which have formed us. A ruin is painful to behold only for the man who is incapable of participating by his activity in the conquest of the present.…”

  He came on me just as I had finished the paragraph. “What!” he exclaimed. “You’re reading Elie Faure?”

  “Why not?” I was at a loss to understand his amazement.

  He hesitated a moment, scratched his head, then answered falteringly: “I don’t know, Henry… I never thought.… Well, I’ll be damned! Do you really find it interesting?”

  “Interesting?” I echoed. “I’m mad about Elie Faure.” “Where are you at?” he asked, reaching for the book. “Ah, I see.” He read the paragraph over, aloud. “I wish I had the time to read that sort of book—it’s too much of a luxury for me.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “One has to swallow such books early in life,” said Karen. “It’s sheer poetry, you know. Makes too much of a demand on one. You’re lucky you have time to spare. You’re still an aesthete.”

  “And you?”

  “Just a work horse, I guess. I’ve put my dreams behind me.”

  “All those books in there.…” I nodded in the direction of the library. “You’ve read them?”

  “Most of them,” he answered. “Some of them I’m reserving for leisure moments.”

  “I noticed you had several books on Paracelsus. I only glanced at them—but they intrigue me.”

  I hoped he would snatch at the bait, but no, he dismissed the subject by remarking, as if to himself, that one could spend a lifetime struggling to grasp the meaning of Paracelsus’ theories.

  “And what about Nostradamus?” I asked. I was intent on getting some spark from him.

  To my surprise his face suddenly lit up. “Ah, that’s another story,” he replied. “Why do you ask—have you been reading him?”

  “One doesn’t read Nostradamus. I’ve been reading about him. What excites me is the Preface which he addressed to his infant son, Caesar. It’s an extraordinary document, in more ways than one. Can you spare a minute?”

  He nodded. I got up, brought the book back, and hunted up the page which had inflamed me just a few days before.

  “Listen to this,” I said. I read him a few salient passages, then stopped abruptly. “There are two passages in this book which… well, they baffle me. Perhaps you can explain them to me. The first one is this: ‘M. le Pelletier (says the author) conceives that the Commun Advènement, or l’ avènement au règne des gens du commum, which I have rendered “the Vulgar Advent,” extending from the death of Louis XVI to the reign of Antichrist, is the grand objects of Nostradamus.’ I’ll come back to this in a moment. Here’s the second one: ‘As an accepted visionary he (Nostradamus) is perhaps less swayed by the imagination than any man of an at all kindred type that one can mention.’ “ I paused. “What do you make of them, if anything?”

  Karen took his time before answering. I surmised that he was conducting an inner debate, first, as to whether he could spare the time to make adequate answer to the question, second, whether it would be worth his while to waste his ammunition on a type like myself.

  “You understand, Henry,” he began, “that you’re asking me to explain something highly complex. Let me ask you first, have you ever read anything by Evelyn Underhill, or by A. A. Waite?” I shook my head. “I thought as much,” he continued. “Naturally you wouldn’t have asked my opinion if you hadn’t sensed the nature of these perplexing statements. I’d like to ask you another question, if you don’t mind. Do you understand the difference between a prophet, a mystic, a visionary and a seer?”

  I hesitated a moment, then said: “Not too clearly, but I see what you’re driving at. I believe, however, that if given time to reflect I could answer your question.”

  “Well, let’s not bother now,” said Karen. “I merely wanted to test your background.”

  “Take it for granted that it’s nil,” said I, growing a bit annoyed by these preliminaries.

  “You must excuse me,” said Karen, “for beginning in this fashion. It’s not very kind, is it? A hangover from school days, I guess. Look here, Henry… Intelligence is one thing—native intelligence, I mean. Knowledge is another. Knowledge and training, I should say, because they go together. What you know you’ve picked up in haphazard fashion. I underwent a rigorous discipline. I say this so that you will understand why I fumble about instead of answering right off the bat. In these matters we speak different languages, you and I. In a way—forgive the thought!—you’re like a superior type of savage. Your I.Q. is probably just as high as mine, perhaps higher. But we approach the domain of knowledge in diametrically opposite ways. Because of my training and background I’m quite apt to underestimate your ability to grasp what I have to impart. And you, for your part, are most apt to think that I am wasting words, splitting hairs, parading my erudition.”

  I interrupted him. “It’s you who fancy all this,” said I. “I haven’t any preconceived notions whatsoever. It doesn’t matter to me how you proceed, so long as you give me a definite answer.”

  “That’s just what I expected you to say, old man. To you it’s all quite simple and straightforward. Not so to me! You see, I was taught to postpone queries of this sort until convinced that I could find the answer nowhere.… However, all this is no answer, is it? Now let’s see.… What was it precisely you wished to know? It’s important to get that straight, otherwise we’ll end up in the Pontine Marshes.”

  I read the second statement over again, giving emphasis to the words “less swayed by the imagination.”

  To my own astonishment I caught myself saying: “Never mind, I understand it perfectly now.”

  “You do?” cried Karen. “Huh! Explain it to me, then, will you?”

  “I’ll try,” said I, “though you must realize that it’s one thing to understand a thing yourself and another to explain it to someone.” (That’s tit for tat, thought I to myself.) Then, sincerely in earnest, I began: “If you were a prophet instead of a statistician or mathematician, I would say that there was something of a r
esemblance between you and Nostradamus. I mean, in the way you go about things. The prophetic art is a gift, and so is the mathematical flair, if I may call it that. Nostradamus, it would seem, refused to exploit his natural gift in the usual way. As you know, he was versed not only in astrology but in the magic arts. He had knowledge of things hidden—or forbidden—to the scholar. He was not only a physician but a psychologist. He was many, many things all in one. In short, he had command of so many co-ordinates that it clipped his wings. He limited himself—I say this advisedly—to what was given, like a scientist. In his solo flights he moved from one level to another with cold-blooded precision, always equipped with instruments, charts, tables and private keys. However fantastic his prophecies may sound to us, I doubt if they originated in dream and reverie. Inspired they were, beyond question. But one has every reason to believe that Nostradamus deliberately refused to give free rein to his imagination. He proceeded objectively, so to speak, even when (paradoxical as it may sound) he was subjugated by trance. The purely personal aspect of his work… I hesitate to call it his creation… centers about the veiled delivery of the oracles, the reason for which he made clear in the Preface to Caesar, his son. There is a dispassionate tone about the nature of these revelations which one feels is not altogether attributable to modesty on the part of Nostradamus. He stresses the fact that it is God who deserves the credit, not himself! Now a true visionary would be fervent about the revelations disclosed to him; he would make haste either to re-create the world, according to the divine wisdom he had tasted, or he would make haste to unite himself with his Creator. A prophet, more egotistical still, would make use of his illumination to take revenge upon his fellow-men… I’m hazarding all this at random, you understand.” I gave him a quick, keen glance to make sure I had him hooked, then continued. “And now, suddenly, I think I begin to understand the real import of the first citation. I mean that part about the grand object of Nostradamus, which, as you recall, the French commentator would have us believe was nothing less than a desire to give predominant significance to the French Revolution. Myself, I think that if Nostradamus had any ulterior motive for dwelling on this event so markedly, it was in order to disclose to us the manner in which history is to be liquidated. A phrase like “la fin des temps”—what does it mean? Can there really be an end to time? And if so, could it possibly mean that time’s end is really our beginning? Nostradamus predicts a millennium to come—in a time not far distant, either. I am no longer sure at the moment whether it follows upon the Day of Judgment or precedes it. Neither am I certain whether his vision extended to the end of the world or not. (He speaks of the year 3797, if I remember rightly, as though that were as far as he could see.) I don’t think the two—the Judgment Day and the end of the world—were meant to be simultaneous. Man knows no end, that’s my conviction. The world may come to an end, but if so, it will be the world imagined by the scientists, not the world God created. When the end comes we will take our world with us. Don’t ask me to explain this—I just know it for a fact.… But to approach this end business from another angle. All it can possibly mean, as I see it now—and to be sure, this is quite enough!—is the emergence of a new and fecund chaos. Were we living in Orphic times we would speak of it as the coming of a new order of gods, meaning, if you like, the investiture of a new and greater consciousness, something even beyond cosmic consciousness. I look upon the Oracles of Nostradamus as the work of an aristocratic spirit. It has meaning only for true individuals.… To get back to the Vulgar Advent, excuse my circumlocutiousness! The phrase so widely used today—the common man—strikes me as an utterly meaningless one. There is no such animal. If the phrase has any meaning at all, and I think Nostradamus certainly implied as much when he spoke of the Vulgar Advent, it means that all that is abstract and negative, or retrogressive, has now assumed dominion. Whatever the common man is or is not, one thing is certain—he is the very antithesis of Christ or Satan. The term itself seems to imply absence of allegiance, absence of faith, absence of guiding principle—or even instinct. Democracy, a vague, empty word, simply denotes the confusion which the common man has ushered in and in which he flourishes like the weed. One might as well say—mirage, illusion, hocus-pocus. Have you ever thought that it may be on this note—on the rise and dominion of an acephalic body—that history will end? Perhaps we will have to begin all over again from where the Cro-Magnon man left off. One thing seems highly evident to me, and that is that the note of doom and destruction, which figures so heavily in all prophecies, springs from the certain knowledge that the historical or world element in man’s life is but transitory. The seer knows how, why and where we got off the track. He knows further that there is little to be done about it, so far as the great mass of humanity is concerned. History must run its course, we say. True, but only because history is the myth, the true myth, of man’s fall made manifest in time. Man’s descent into the illusory realm of matter must continue until there is nothing left to do but swim up to the surface of reality—and live in the light of everlasting truth. The men of spirit constantly exhort us to hasten the end and commence anew. Perhaps that is why they are called paracletes, or divine advocates. Comforters, if you like. They never exult in the coming of catastrophe, as mere prophets sometimes do. They indicate, and usually illustrate by their lives, how we may convert seeming catastrophe to divine ends. That is to say, they show us, those of us who are ready and aware, how to adapt and attune ourselves to a reality which is permanent and indestructible. They make their appeal.…”